Cities in India are dreaming of becoming New York and London but we seldom worry about as basic an issue as sewage and its disposal in our country. The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has brought out a two-volume book titled Excreta Matters: Report on the State of India’s Environment to highlight how only 20 per cent of sewage is being treated in the country. Sunita Narain, director general, CSE, talks about the murky issue plaguing the water sources in this interview to Rashme Sehgal.
Q. Why did you decide to focus on the subject of excreta?
A. Our key concern is the growing pollution of our lakes and rivers. We are losing all our water sources. The more money we are spending to control this pollution, the more the pollution is increasing. The question to be asked is whether the lack of money is affecting our ability to tackle this problem or are their other issues at stake.
When we started looking at this issue afresh, we found ourselves looking at the whole issue of sewage and how little we know about the amount of sewage we are generating and how it is being disposed.
Eighty per cent of water leaves the house as sewage but cities have no account of the sewage that is being generated.

Q. Surely water is a subject of far more importance than excreta?
A. Everyone talks about water. The government talks about water. NGOs talk about clean drinking water, if the people do not get water for a single day, there will be a huge hue-and-cry. If you look at the literature of our country, you will find no information at all about sewage. No one in the government talks about it. My own sense is that we are a casteist society and the business of sewage has been left to someone who is not us. We are also a very arrogant society which believes once the infrastructure for sewage disposal has been created, everything will be alright. It is to correct this attitude that the CSE decided to look into this whole problem.

Q. What approach did you follow?
A. Our approach was three-fold. We prepared a detailed questionnaire with questions relating to where does our water come from, where does sewage go, etc. and asked volunteers to distribute it to the municipal corporations of 71 cities. Unfortunately, the information that we gathered had huge holes. They did not have information on how much was their water supply, how much their water deficit and what they did with their sewage. For the larger cities, including Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, we were able to collect some data but for most of our cities, we drew a blank. Its a black hole. Since the information was not available from the corporations, we looked at other sources including the JNNURM reports and put together the first volume which provides an overview.
I’ll cite the example of Bengaluru which according to its municipal corporation generates 780 million litres of sewage per day. The city receives a supply of 900 million litres of water, while the sewage output comprises 80 per cent of its water supply. This is a guess estimate. But even in Bengaluru, the capacity to treat sewage is 300 million litres per day. The question is where is the remaining sewage going? It is going into the ground water and that is why we have such high levels of nitrate content in our ground water. In 2009, we generated 38,255 million tonnes of sewage per day but actually treated only 22 per cent.
Bengaluru is one of our better-run cities but still it cannot provide underground sewage for all its people. Both Hyderabad and Chennai possess good water board but what happens to our next level of cities such as Sholapur, Bhopal, Jaipur, Srinagar, Lucknow and Pune? Or take the example of Gurgaon. Most of the sewage from the city does not get trapped, rather most of it flows into drains outside the city.
Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda has promised a fancy network of underground Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs) but this should be done simultaneously. When you try and do retrofitting, it will only serve to create a huge backlog.
The costs of underground STPs are also prohibitive, costing `1 crore for 1 kilometre. Delhi has 6,000 km of sewage pipeline. Our sewage pipelines are many lengths of the total roads in India.
We are spending large sums of money in supplying water but no one is focusing on sewage disposal, not government, not sewage control boards and not private companies. It is because 90 per cent of our sewage is going into our ground water and contaminating it that we are facing a major health problem. Why do thousands of our babies die of diarrhoea and dysentery. No one has made this connection. Once we have contaminated all our water sources, it will be too late.

Q. What kind of responses should the government develop?
A. We need to develop innovative ways to deal with this problem. For example, we need to develop treatment zones for all the sewage which is flowing in open drains. We need to upscale our technologies. We should ensure that all sewage must be treated in all our new colonies.
I was driving across Delhi to Bhiwadi near Alwar and the entire area is becoming a development zone. The question is what are we doing to ensure all our new cities have proper sewage treatment plans in place. We need to turn this issue on its head and plan for sewage first and everything else later. We also need to ensure that sewage treatment is done at affordable levels.

Q. Varanasi faces a major sewage disposal problem and the entire Ganga cleaning programme hinges around this issue?
A. Varanasi’s is a classic case of an old city without underground drainage provisions for disposing off sewage. In fact, even in Allahabad, 80 per cent of the sewage is not being trapped. STPs were constructed in Varanasi but there is no electricity to run these plants and neither do the local bodies have the money to run them.
Activist Vir Bhadra Mishra came up with a solution by which the sewage would flow along the gradient of the land in a nullah to be treated outside the city. His plan was found to be expensive but the plan offered by the local state engineers was much more expensive. The result is that Vir Bhadra’s suggestion has been blocked. The local committees see big money in the Ganga cleaning programme and have cleared an annual subsidy of `2,000 crores for five years for operation and maintenance of these STPs. The question is what will happen in the sixth year? Many of our older cities did have a sewage network. With the government embarking on a major urbanisation programme in the next 15 years, sewage disposal will have to be integrated into this system.
Excreta should be seen as a resource. It can be recycled and sold as manure. In Alwar. treated sewage is sold to farmers as was the practise in Okhla.